New Publication: EuroQol Protocols for Time Trade-Off Valuation of Health States

OHE’s Koonal Shah is co-author of a new paper examining EuroQol protocols for time trade-off valuation of health states.

Time trade-off (TTO) is a stated preference technique that can be used to obtain values for health states for use in the economic evaluation of health technologies. Several variants of TTO are available. Protocols for implementing TTO vary in several ways, such as the procedure for ‘iterating’ towards a point of indifference, and the method for obtaining values for health states considered to be ‘worse than dead’. The use of different TTO variants leads to two practical problems: incomparability across studies and difficulty in choosing among the variants.

The EuroQol Group, an international, multi-disciplinary network of researchers, has developed three standardised TTO protocols for the valuation of health states described by its EQ-5D instruments. One of those protocols, known as the EQ-VT protocol, is recommended for the valuation of EQ-5D-5L health states, and was used in OHE’s EQ-5D-5L value set for England study.

Screenshot from the EQ-VT TTO protocol

Source: EuroQol Valuation Technology; ©EuroQol Research Foundation

Just published in PharmacoEconomics is an open access article that explains how the TTO technique works and describes the EuroQol protocols for TTO valuations. The paper is authored by Mark Oppe, Juan Manuel Ramos‐Goñi (both of the EuroQol Research Foundation), Kim Rand-Hendriksen (Akershus University Hospital and the University of Oslo), Nan Luo (National University of Singapore) and OHE’s Koonal Shah.

Access the paper here (available for free download).

Preparation of the paper was partially supported by the EuroQol Research Foundation. However, the views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the EuroQol Research Foundation.

Cite as:

Oppe, M., Rand-Hendriksen, K., Shah, K., Ramos‐Goñi, J.M. and Luo, N., 2016. EuroQol protocols for time trade-off valuation of health outcomes. PharmacoEconomics. DOI: 10.1007/s40273-016-0404-1

Related publications by OHE staff:

Devlin, N., Buckingham, K., Shah, K.K., Tsuchiya, A., Tilling, C., Wilkinson, G. and van Hout, B., 2013. A comparison of alternative variants of the lead and lag time TTO. Health Economics, 22(5), pp.517-532.

Devlin, N.J. and Krabbe, P.F., 2013. The development of new research methods for the valuation of EQ-5D-5L. European Journal of Health Economics, 14(Suppl 1), pp.S1-S3.

Shah, K., Mulhern, B., Longworth, L., Janssen, M.F., 2016. An empirical study of two alternative comparators for use in time trade-off studies. Value in Health, 19, pp.53-59.